Instead of posting the day of the 9/11, I thought I'd post after it. Since 'after' is when everything happened. 

6 years ago today we regretfully woke up to a new world one short day after the incomprehensible act of violence that made the world so much smaller, and yet so dauntingly huge and alien at the same time. It wasn't an easy morning, we didn't rise with the bleary carelessness we had the day before, instead we staggered out of bed after a rough night of attempted sleep. 

6 years ago we were great nation. We were peaceful, and the world largely respected us for acts of our past. We had ethics and values and tried to uphold civil rights, we freed and liberated those held under by more calloused hands. When the attack happened they mourned our loss with us, many holding vigils in their capitols and town squares burning candles for a place most had only seen on tv. They held our hand, and held the other up vowing to help us avenge the despicable crime. We were comforted in knowing we were not alone, that our years of aiding the world might bring them to aid to us. 

And we waited for those many long months that turned into years, waiting for our leaders to avenge our loss. A collective breath turned into many, and we waited some more. Two years pass, and much of the rage with it. We thought they were being careful by not rushing to strike back. Oh how foolish we were.

6 years later we have nothing to show for any of it. We've betrayed those who were killed that day with a war that was aimed at the wrong target for reasons that we may never truly know. We've seen four times as many more of our people die in their name, and killed twenty times more of theirs, with nothing to show at the end of the day. We've let down all the peoples of the world. Those who had once looked up to us in our hour of grief with respect now looked on in horror as when we turned our mourning and wishes for a just retribution into a grasping, desperate act of blind revenge for someone's wrong reason. The guilty still walk unpunished, the venerated dead still lie unavenged. Our leaders flounder desperately, caught in their own web of lies. Most of us are still having trouble facing ourselves in the mirror.

6 years ago the United States I knew died. It didn't sleep, it didn't wander off into the desert to find itself after a bad breakup. It died without so much as a sigh after putting the noose around it's own neck.

The country I see now is not the country I grew up in, the country whose ideals my hippy parents pressed on me. My country did not torture like those we foughagainst, we were above the ways of tyrants and fiends. We did not lie, cheat or steal, we did not plunder, and we did not capitalize on the suffering of others, or our own – and yet my country, and it's leaders, have done all of these in the past few years and much more.

In 6 years we have undone what took over 200 to make. Sometimes I wonder if the rest of the world misses our old selves more than we do. I doubt we'll earn back what we've truly lost in my lifetime.  That's the saddest part of all this. We did far more damage to ourselves than any terrorist ever did.

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